Tag Archives: German Christian Movement

Article Note: Heath Spencer, “The Thuringian Volkskirchenbund, the Nazi Revolution, and Völkisch Conceptions of Christianity”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: Heath Spencer, “The Thuringian Volkskirchenbund, the Nazi Revolution, and Völkisch Conceptions of Christianity,” Church History 87, no. 4 (December 2018): 1091-1118.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Recently, Heath Spencer of Seattle University has been investigating the connections and disconnections between German liberal Protestant thought and Nazi conceptions of Christianity. In this article, he tackles the question of why prominent Thuringian liberal Protestants in the Volkskirchenbund (People’s Church League) supported the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen (German Christians) in the German church elections of July 1933. He argues that ideological affinity between the Volkskirchenbund and the German Christians was less important than pragmatic and strategic considerations, and that these liberal Protestants only supported German Christians reluctantly, once other options had been exhausted. “Their story,” Spencer writes, “illustrates one of the more complicated paths toward Christian complicity in the Third Reich” (1092).

The episode around which Spencer’s article revolves was the decision of the Volkskirchenbund—a liberal faction in the Thuringian Protestant synod—not to run their own candidates in the July 1933 church election, but rather to recommend to their members that they vote for the list of candidates put forward by the German Christian Movement, the leading pro-Nazi faction. The result was that the Volkskirchenbund disappeared from the synod and became a study group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), while the German Christians went on to capture 46 of the 51 seats in the synod and proceeded to make Thuringia a bastion of Nazi Protestantism.

Spencer critiques the view offered by Karl Barth and promulgated by members of the theologically conservative Confessing Church that the rise of the German Christian Movement was the product of two centuries of theological modernism. Thuringian Volkskirchenbund leaders, he suggests, “did not rush into the arms of the Deutsche Christen in July 1933; anxiety and resignation were prominent alongside of cautious optimism and occasional expressions of enthusiasm” (1094).

Tracing Thuringian church politics from 1918-1933, Spencer argues that the Thuringian church constitution of 1924 gave rise to diverse church-political factions, including the Volkskirchenbund, which represented the political left, over and against the right-leaning Lutheran Christliche Volksbund (Christian People’s League) and the centrist Einigungsbund (Unification League). The Volkskirchenbund aligned itself with other German liberal Protestants who “called for democratic governance, theological pluralism, and churches that stood above political parties and narrow class interests—all key elements of the liberal Protestant Volkskirche ideal” (1098). Heinrich Weinel (professor of New Testament in Jena) was a key figure in the Volkskirchenbund, working with other liberal Protestant leaders to advocate for modern theology, innovative adult education programs, and interdenominational elementary schools to broaden the reach of liberal Protestantism (and liberal politics) in the region.

After 1924, however, both Thuringian parliamentary politics and church politics became more conservative. In the Protestant synod, the rise of leftist Religious Socialists was matched by the emergence of a new völkisch group, Bund für Deutsche Kirche (League for German Church), which began introducing “church legislation that promoted racial purity, hardline nationalism, and the removal of ‘Jewish elements’ from Christianity” (1105). Because liberals in the Volkskirchenbund promoted theological pluralism, they professed openness towards both these new groups. Indeed, Heinrich Weinel and others became increasingly engaged with the Christian-völkisch movement in Thuringia, combining “gestures of toleration, criticism of ‘excesses,’ and partial affirmation” in their responses, even proving willing to “recognize race and nation as the God-given foundations of all human life and all human love,” as Weinel put it (1106).

By the beginning of the 1930s, as the völkisch movement grew dramatically in both the Thuringian state and church, the Volkskirchenbund (now led by Hans Heyn) remained open to it as an important expression of Christianity among German people, criticizing only those aspects that liberals deemed overly divisive, including some of the anti-Jewish elements of the Bund für Deutsche Kirche.

Ultimately, though, a völkisch wing emerged within the Volkskirchenbund itself, particularly among younger members who were animated by the ways in which German racial nationalism seemed to unite society and church. By the time of the Nazi seizure of power and the 1933 church elections, four new developments pushed the Volkskirchenbund to capitulate to völkisch Protestantism: the rise of the German Christian Movement, which polled strongly in the January 1933 church elections; the frustration of Volkskirchenbund leaders over their failure to attract more younger followers; their fear that theological conservatives would seize control and make Thuringia too sectarian; and their lack of money to run a proper campaign in the July 1933 church elections (1111-1112). In the end, leaders in the Volkskirchenbund decided that the German Christians best represented the church-political goals of the Volkskirchenbund, sent around an official announcement of their support for the pro-Nazi Protestants, and effectively closed up shop on their own movement.

Spencer’s article illuminates the way theological liberals in the Volkskirchenbund—committed to pluralism and unity—brought themselves to support the German Christian Movement. They hoped to ensure that the church did not miss its chance to “to rescue an embattled and divided nation, to remedy the mistakes of the past” and “to meet the needs of the hour” (1118). “Ironically, their dream of a free, democratic, and culturally relevant Volkskirche led them to support—at least momentarily—an authoritarian group determined to impose its militant and racist ideology on the church and its members” (1118).

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933,” Canadian-American Theological Review 7 (2018): 124-137.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

David A.R. Clark, a PhD candidate at Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology, has written a compact overview and theological assessment of Reinhold Krause’s famous Sportpalast speech of November 1933, in which the Berlin leader of the German Christian Faith Movement (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen) “demanded the elimination of Jewish influences from the Protestant church, calling for the deletion of Hebraisms from hymnody, the rejection of the theology of ‘rabbi Paul,’ and the erasure of the Old Testament itself. Ominously, Krause also endorsed excluding Christians of Jewish descent from the churches” (124). Drawing on the speech itself and several English-language historical analyses, Clark highlights what he calls a “conflation of hostilities” in which the “German Christian Movement targeted the Old Testament for exclusion and destruction even as Nazi leadership targeted Jews for exclusion and destruction.” He argues that “the parallels were not incidental; rather, invective against the Old Testament, in the context of Nazi Germany, yielded violent implications” (125).

Clark begins with the background to Krause’s speech, outlining the rise of the pro-Nazi and antisemitic German Christian Movement in 1932 and noting its attempt to fuse Protestant Christianity and Nazi ideology through a racialist ecclesiology in which a German national church would unite Aryan German Protestants (and Catholics) and exclude Christians of Jewish descent. Given its rapid growth through 1933, the German Christians hoped a large rally in the Berlin Sportpalast would launch a massive new propaganda campaign and prove their indispensability to the Nazi regime. On November 13, 1933, some 20,000 supporters of the German Christian Movement filled the arena, which was decorated with swastikas and other Nazi material. They came to hear a series of speakers, headlined by local high school religion teacher and German Christian leader Dr. Reinhold Krause.

Clark describes the speech itself as crude and abusive—an attack against the Old Testament and other fundamentals of Christianity derived from Jewish influences. Analyzing Krause’s “anti-Jewish and anti-Old Testament rhetoric” (127), Clark finds that Krause connected the supposed unity of the German people (Volk) under Adolf Hitler with the idea of a powerful people’s church (Volkskirche) which would mirror the Nazi state and support the remolding of Germans into National Socialists. Clark quotes some of the lowlights of the speech:

Krause denounced “rabbi Paul,” whose “scapegoat- and inferiority-theology” had led to an “un-National Socialist” desire “to cling to a kind of salvation egotism.” Similarly, Krause condemned Jewish traces in hymnody and liturgy, decrying the intrusion of Hebrew words into German worship. “We want to sing songs that are free from any Israelite-isms,” he demanded, adding: “We want to free ourselves from the language of Canaan.” … In what became a notorious section of his speech, Krause demanded “liberation from the Old Testament with its Jewish reward-and-punishment morality, with its stories of cattle-dealers and pimps” (128, 129).

Clark goes on to argue that Krause conflated invective against the Old Testament and hostility towards contemporary Jews. Even Krause he scorned elements of Judaism within German Protestantism, he also lashed out against Jews themselves, advocating the expulsion of Christians of Jewish ancestry from the church. Just as Nazis rejected purchasing goods and services from Jews, he reasoned, so too should Christians reject receiving spiritual goods from Jews—whether biblical content from ancient Jews or spiritual ministry from contemporary Jewish Christians.

As for the effect of the Sportpalast speech, Clark observes that its contents were widely reported in both the German and international press and adds that the speech was published as a pamphlet and distributed by German Christians in Berlin and beyond. But the speech was widely criticized by Protestant clergy, especially for its radical rejection of the Old Testament as Scripture. The ensuing controversy led to a mass of clerical resignations from the German Christian camp and sparked an ecclesiastical opposition movement that grew into the Confessing Church. For the German Christian base, however, Krause’s antisemitic attacks against the Bible, Jewish language, and Jewish Christians became programmatic.

Finally, Clark turns to the violent impact of the Sportpalast speech. Drawing on an incident reported in Doris Bergen’s definitive study Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), in which a German Christian writer urged the burning of Jewish parts of the Bible as well as “that which threatens our people” (presumably meaning the Jews themselves), Clark notes the connection between antisemitic rhetoric within German Protestantism and the genocidal campaign of the Hitler regime.

Reflecting theologically, Clark observes that Krause’s speech involved “violent rhetoric targeting Jewish Scriptures in the context of violent rhetoric—and murderous action—targeting Jewish people” (134). Asking “how should the implications of anti-Old Testament invective be defined in the genocidal context of Nazi Germany?” (134), Clark affirms that the German Christians helped create the conditions in which genocide could occur, on the basis that they “effectively weaponized specific aspects of the Christian tradition for antisemitic purposes” (135). While Clark acknowledges that the Nazi Holocaust would have unfolded much the way it did with or without these German Christian contributions, he concludes that the German Christians “participated in the broader framework of complicity that made the destruction of Jews a conceivable and convincing option for Christian Europe” (136).

Clark’s essay won the Jack and Phyllis Middleton Memorial Award for Excellence in Bible and Theology, awarded to the best paper by a graduate student or non-tenured professor given at the interdisciplinary theology conference on “Peace and Violence in Scripture and Theology,” sponsored by the Canadian-American Theological Association (CATA) at Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario, October 20, 2018.

Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). Pp. 486. ISBN 9781451464726.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Since 1945, Nazism has been universally condemned. Historians have written extensively, but always pejoratively, about its personalities, its politics, its ideology, and particularly its crimes, which culminated in the Holocaust. As a result, less research has been carried out, and always negatively, into the reasons why Nazism gained support from an overwhelming majority of Germans, including many Protestant churchmen and women. Particularly vocal in Nazism’s cause was the minority group pf Protestants known as the German Christian Faith Movement, whose members very actively sought to introduce and popularize Nazi ideas into the liturgical and practical life of their parishes. Mary Solberg has now selected and translated into English a useful collection of this group’s writings, which provide an English-speaking readership with the full range of their ideas. Presumably she feels that the time is not yet ripe, or the audience not yet ready, for any extended analysis of these sources.

Solberg-Church Despite the excellent contributions of such authors as James Zabel, Doris Bergen and Robert Ericksen, Solberg feels that “far too few people in or out of the academy know far too little“ about the conduct of the churches In Hitler’s Germany. But her extended introduction clearly indicates her approach to answering the questions posed by her documents: specifically what role did this German Christian Faith Movement play in the wider picture; how successful or significant were its supporters in the rise and maintenance of Nazism, at least up to 1940; and how should Christians and churches today learn from this example of a church undone? Her skillful translations of the writings of several prominent members of this movement will be of considerable value to those who do not read German, but it would have been helpful to have a biographical note or appendix outlining the careers of these authors. Her conclusion is that this was not a unique episode, that the conflation of political, racist and nationalist ideas with theological witness is a constant temptation, and therefore that the German experience in the 1930s deserves further study by both theologians and historians.

The opening chapter provides us with the original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement, written in 1932 by Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder, who went on to become Bishop of Brandenburg in September 1933. He shared the views of many younger clergymen who regarded the leaders of the various provincial Protestant churches as outdated conservatives. They had failed to catch the spirit of renewal needed to bring Protestant witness up-to-date. By contrast, the Nazi Party had caught the imagination of the people and had already affirmed in its platform through its support for “Positive Christianity”. The church could not afford to be left behind, but should rally its supporters behind the values of the German race, ethnicity, and nation, following the lead given by Adolf Hitler. Armed with this kind of “heroic piety”, the German Christian Movement would be ready to take up the struggle against godless Marxism.

The Nazi take-over of power in January 1933 was naturally enthusiastically greeted by the members of the German Christian Movement. They applauded the Nazis’ initial measures against the Jews, such as the law passed in April debarring Jews from public office with the application of the so-called “Aryan Paragraph”. During the summer, church elections saw the supporters of the movement installed in high positions in many church bodies, such as the Synod of the Old Prussian Union Church, which in September resolved to apply the “Aryan Paragraph” to its clergy. But this move aroused vigorous opposition, such as that expressed by Karl Barth, then a professor in Bonn, whose 15-page pamphlet is here reproduced in full.

Together with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose shorter protest is also given, these forceful objections in defence of Protestant orthodoxy stressed the fact that all Christians were joined in a common baptism, and could not be separated on the basis of racial origin. However, they limited these protests on behalf of those converted Jews who had become Christians and did not raise questions about the wider scope of Nazi persecutions. The members of the German Christian Movement were not so reticent. They called for a more complete renunciation of all things Jewish in both church membership and liturgical practice. In a notably violent speech before a large audience of 20,000 supporters in November 1933, one of the radical German Christians, Reinhold Krause, called for a complete alignment of the church with National Socialism, in particular by “liberating itself from the Old Testament with its Jewish rewards and punishment morality and its stories of cattle-dealers and pimps”. German Christians instead must “return to the heroic Jesus” as a “fearless combatant” against the pernicious influence of the Jewish Scribes and Pharisees. But this speech went too far for the majority of Protestant loyalists who then left the movement, and transferred their allegiance to the nucleus demanding church independence, which later coalesced into the Confessing Church.

More effective support for the German Christian Movement came from the theological professors, such as Emanuel Hirsch of Göttingen or Gerhard Kittel of Tübingen, both of whom had distinguished publication records. Hirsch became and remained a “true believer” in National Socialism, even after 1945, since, as he claimed, “God speaks in and to the particular historical situation in which people find themselves – in this case National Socialist Germany”. The church should not isolate itself on the remains of Reformation theology, as did Barth, but instead the church is called to be engaged with the new spirit of national regeneration, and reflect and contribute to the drive for racial purity, which left no room for Jewish Christians. Kittel, the author of the most widely used biblical dictionary, was even more prolific in addressing large audiences up and down the country. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and shortly afterwards wrote a major piece on the Jewish issue, which was a central one for all the members of the German Christian Movement. His purpose, according to one source, was to raise the discussion of the Jewish question above the level of slogans and vulgar racism and give it a moral Christian basis. He claimed that there were four solutions to the Jewish issue: extermination, expulsion, assimilation or a guest status, where Jews would be tolerated so long as they kept to separate ways. He judged the first three solutions to be impractical, so argued fiercely for the fourth. After the war, when he was put on trial for his Nazi sympathies, Kittel tried to argue he had been only a moderate campaigner, but the forcefulness of the extracts printed here suggests otherwise.

Solberg also provides a number of extracts from the speeches or writings of leading members of the German Christian Movement, such as Joachim Hossenfelder, Julius Leutheuser, Siegfried Leffler, and the Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, all written in the early years of Nazi rule. In addition, she provides a thoughtful critique of these views by Professor Paul Althaus of Erlangen, who argued that the conflation of German nationalism, admiration for Hitler, and Christian tradition went far too far by asserting that God’s salvation was being played out in Germany’s history. This, he claimed, was a “bald-faced theological heresy”. But Althaus’ own variant of the “orders of creation” included a positive enthusiasm for National Socialism as a political movement and for an ethno-national Christianity. He utterly rejected any idea that the combination of Nazi politics and the Faith Movement’s version of religion could turn Germany into a world-savior.

It is clear that these divisions within the Protestant churches led to Hitler abandoning any hopes he had held that they would combine under his authority. Instead he increasingly supported the anti-clerical and anti-Christian elements in the Nazi leadership, such as Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Reinhard Heydrich and Joseph Goebbels, who were to institute increasingly severe measures of persecution and repression on the churches. These doomed any chances of the German Christian Movement’s hopes for success. Its leaders made one final bid to win back support in their notable Godesberg Declaration of March 1939, in which they indicated their strong support for the regime’s hostile antisemitic policies and established an Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. The final document in this collection is by Walter Grundmann, the first academic director of the Institute, whose career continue into the German Democratic Republic, where he served for many years as a pastor, publishing widely-used commentaries on the gospels but also working as an informant for the Stasi. There is little evidence that he changed his view that “the content of Jesus’ preaching shapes and determines his work. In Jesus of Nazareth something utterly un-Jewish appears”.

Solberg does not attempt any evaluation of these sources, but her careful and viable translations will be of help to English-speaking students who will now be able to trace the vagaries of this section of German Protestantism during its short but vibrant and mistaken career. It remains to be seen whether the temptations to which these authors gave expression will be repeated in churches elsewhere. She has given us a useful cautionary tale.